On 31 May 1926, a ship carrying the entire Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra docked in Reykjavík. The musicians stayed in Iceland for 17 days, giving 14 concerts of music by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert at venues including a tuberculosis sanatorium. Local critic Árni Thorsteinson described the visit as “the greatest event in the history of the arts in this country.” While the rest of Europe was falling for cinema, Icelanders were getting their first taste of a full-size live symphony orchestra.
Organised instrumental music making came late to Iceland, hardly surprising in a country that still has to import everything except electricity and fish. Today, the nation’s musical life has to be seen – and preferably heard – to be believed. Increasingly, Iceland’s genre-blind musicians channel the challenges of living on a forbidding chunk of volcanic rock into the creation of progressive music that gives the impression of having resounded for ever. Icelanders cleave to homegrown acts, with a quarter of Top 10-charting music on Spotify made domestically, but the rest of the world appears to love those acts too. Björk, Sigur Rós and Ólafur Arnalds are some of the best-known names to have found global success with highly distinctive music; every month, more than 19 times Iceland’s entire population streams a track by the Reykjavík band Of Monsters and Men.
